ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: On the Proposal to Reunify Behavioral Sciences: Some Critical Remarks from and for Institutional Economics
Author: Ambrosino Angela, Cedrini Mario Aldo
The current era in economics seems one of increasing pluralism, shaped by the emergence of a series of new research programmes that position themselves in direct opposition to neoclassical economics. In the times of a major crisis of economic theory, this appears as a long-term trend, having its deep roots in the crumbling edifice of microfoundations, the challenge posed to mainstream economics by the information-theoretic approach and the diffusion of game theory and experiments as main tools for studying economic behavior. Scholars are currently debating on the possibility that this pluralism of approaches may lead to a new dominant one, and about what paradigm economics has likely entered into. The economics that supports recent proposals of building an encompassing framework for behavioral sciences on evolutionary theory (as integrating principle) and game theory (as analytical tool) appears to offer a likely candidate or, in any case, to be representative enough of possible future trends in this regard. Adopting an institutionalist perspective, the paper wants to shed light on the possible criticalities of the attempt to get rid of the proclaimed incompatibility of the models employed in the various behavioral sciences, and the burden imposed by historically problematic relationships between mainstream economics and other social disciplines. Second, it elaborates on the contribution of the new institutional economics to the programme, with a view to assessing what of the tradition of original institutional economics risks being lost, possibly to the detriment of the creation of a truly interdisciplinary institutional political economy.
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